Public Citizen quantified the intersection of trade and the 2006 elections.  This is old news, but well worth reviewing because I'll bet a lot of you never saw it.

Net fair trade gain of 2006 Mid-Term Election:
House races where fair traders replaced anti-fair traders: 19
Senate races where fair traders replaced anti-fair traders: 6
House races where fair traders took open seats vacated by anti-fair traders: 11
Senate races where fair traders took open seats vacated by anti-fair traders: 1
House races where anti-fair traders replaced fair traders: 0
Senate races where anti-fair traders replaced fair traders: 0

Glancing at the full report is worthwhile. (I have been warming to the "smart trade" rather than "fair trade" term, but have not focused grouped it yet).

Sure it was a rout by the Dems.  But look through a different lens.  An issue lens rather than a partisan one.  Was it Iraq?  "No" is a good argument. 

Several high profile Dems challenged GOP incumbents on the Iraq war/occupation (but not trade) to no avail.  Tammy Duckworth was one well publicized challenger in Illinois' 6th District who lost to Peter Roskam.  She was an Iraq war vet and amputee.  She ran heavily on Iraq but lost.

No party should own the trade issue.  If you are a Dem, you should work for more and better Dems on trade.  If you are a Republican, you should work for more and better Republicans on trade.  Dems should not cut slack to Charlie Rangel and Max Baucus.  Republicans should not cut slack to John McCain and Charles Grassley.

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Running a "trade" surplus ... good idea : Robert Powell A surplus. What a concept! You're correct, of course. We've accumulated such a large "trade" debt that we need to run a large surplus for decades to pay it off. At this point, just getting to balance appears to be impossible because the U.S. produces inadequate tradable goods and because the U.S. economy will soon collapse. John Williams' HYPERINFLATION SPECIAL REPORT at http://www.shadowstats.com/article/292 has this: The U.S. economy is in an intensifying inflationary recession that eventually will evolve into a hyperinflationary great depression. ... The U.S. has no way of avoiding a financial Armageddon. ... The U.S. economy is in a deepening structural change that has resulted from U.S. trade policies that have driven the U.S. manufacturing base offshore. As a result, a large number of related, high paying jobs have been lost to U.S. workers. As shown in the accompanying graphs, as the U.S. trade deficit has risen to the highest level for any country in history, U.S. average weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, have fallen. Even using official CPI for deflation, current real earnings are below their peak back in the 1970s. Adjusted for the SGS-Alternate CPI measure, real earnings have been falling since the early 1980s. Also shown are real median incomes for U.S. males versus females, showing declines in recent years, per official government data. The effect of this structural change has been that most consumers have been unable to sustain adequate income growth beyond the rate of inflation, unable to maintain their standard of living. The only way that personal consumption — the dominant component of GDP — can grow in such a circumstance is for the consumer to take on new debt or to liquidate savings. Both those factors are short-lived and have reached untenable extremes. Debt expansion and savings liquidation both were encouraged by the investment bubbles created by Alan Greenspan; he knew that economic growth could not be had otherwise. Part of what is happening today is payback for those policies. This circumstance places both the federal government and the Federal Reserve in untenable positions, where they cannot easily or rapidly address the underlying problems, even if standard economic stimuli were available. From the standpoint of the federal government, traditional fiscal stimulus in the form of tax cuts or increased federal spending have reached their practical limits, with the actual annual budget deficit running out of control at $4.0-plus trillion per year. From the Fed’s standpoint, it can neither stimulate the economy nor contain inflation. Lowering rates has done little to stimulate the structurally-impaired economy, and raising rates may become necessary in defense of the dollar. Similarly, raising rates will do little to contain a non-demand driven inflation, such as seen in the current circumstance that is so heavily affected by high oil prices. By the time hyperinflation kicks in, the economy already should be in depression, and the hyperinflation quickly should pull the economy into a great depression. Uncontained inflation is likely to bring normal commercial activity to a halt. Such is consistent with the final graph in this group, which shows household income dispersion at historic highs. The greater the variance in income, the more negative are the longer term economic implications. A person earning $100,000,000 per year is not going to buy that many more automobiles that someone earning $100,000 per year. The stronger the middle class is, generally the stronger the economy will be. Extremes in income variance usually are followed by financial panics and economic depressions. U.S. Income variance today is higher than it was coming into 1929, and it is nearly double that of any other "advanced" economy. Bummer. July 23, 2008 Smart trade is surplus : Stumo Some argue that the "smart" way is to reclaim our trade surplus in order to truly achieve that balance. I'll settle for balance right now, but like the goal of a surplus, like during 90% of U.S. history. July 23, 2008 "Smart Trade" : Robert Powell The "smart" policy would be "balanced trade." Create "Balanced Trade": "Free trade" or "fair trade" won't correct our out-of-balance "trade deficit." The solution: "balanced trade. Those who promote "free trade" are "unbalanced." How to Create "Balanced Trade": Use Warren Buffett's outcome-based Import Certificates mechanism: If a country purchases products or services from the U.S., then it can sell that amount back to the U.S. If it does not want to sell to the U.S., it can sell its Import Certificates to another country that does want to sell to the U.S. This effectively deals with what he describes as "a shifting maze of punitive tariffs, export subsidies, quotas, dollar-locked currencies, and the like." This market-based mechanism would produce the desired outcome: balanced trade. This is necessary because anything out of balance will be, WILL BE, brought back into balance. The more out of balance it's allowed to become, the more severe will be the correction ... and we're headed for a very severe correction. July 23, 2008

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